You've got to wonder, is that a security measure or anti-competitive behaviour. "It's our user, only we get to read his email."
Paranoid much? Seriously, the reasons Google encrypts data are more to do with protecting your privacy than some paranoid fear that Microsoft will snoop the data and use it against them...
Interesting. If that were the case, then the impact should have been mostly restricted to states where abortion was illegal pre-Roe. (Sure, people do move, but it's a lot less likely that poor people are going to relocate to another state.) Is that seen?
Yes, actually, there were 5 states that legalized abortion in 1970, and those 5 states started a downward crime trend 3 years earlier than the rest of the states, where abortion was legalized in 1973.
Interesting - but couldn't this be a correlation != causation issue? Also it seems to imply that violent or criminal behavior is due to organic brain damage. Is that a given?
I think that correlation!=causation applies here.
I read a far more plausible reason in the book Freakonomics (great book btw), which postulates that the fall in crime rates in the US was attributable to the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court. The logic is that unwanted children are more likely to fall into a life of crime, due to their mothers not caring for them properly, therefore, the low crime rates we are seeing now are directly due to a generation of children that were raised after Roe v. Wade, where abortions were legal. I find that much more believable, although it's not necessarily politically correct to have opinions like this among pro-life control freaks...
The legalized abortion and crime effect is the controversial theory that legal abortion reduces crime. Proponents of the theory generally argue that "unwanted children" are more likely to become criminals and that an inverse correlation is observed between the availability of abortion and subsequent crime. In particular, it is argued that the legalization of abortion in the United States, largely due to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, has reduced crime in recent years. Opponents generally dispute these statistics, and point to negative effects of abortion on society.
So from here, it appears that new FIOS rollouts are being 0wned nearly as quickly as they're connected, and that they're staying 0wned. I'm sure the spammers are quite pleased with the quality service provided by Verizon et.al.
Or, it could just be that customers took their already infected computers from their existing ISP and plugged them into their shiny new FIOS connection, giving them a different source IP address to send the same spam through...
But, no, far more likely that it's some grand conspiracy by Verizon to saturate the internet with spam delivered at 100 megabit + speeds to as to completely shut the internet down. Then they can charge all of us extra money for access to the "V-net" (Verizon net)...:rolleyes:
This is correct. EVE's forum logins are tightly tied to your account and characters.
It has always been that only players with active accounts could post on the forums, and in addition on some forums players are forbidden from posting unless they have chosen to make certain information (such as their corporation and alliance affiliation) public.
Alright, Single Sign On (SSO) is a good thing usually. But haven't they ever heard of LDAP before? Why have username/passwords in the database, especially if they suspect hackers might compromise the database? What they really should do is have external authentication servers running LDAP and have both the game client and the forums use that as an authentication source.
It never ceases to amaze me when companies that should know better do stupid things.
Sure, we'll be hearing lots of good things about this game....in about 6 months time once they finally get around to ironing all the bugs out of multiplayer. I mean, when I party with someone, it kinda helps to be able to see their guy in my instance. If I'm lucky I'll see the floating name above their character -- but that only happens about 5% of the time. Rest of the time, it's like I'm fighting alone.
And that engineer drone bug. The one that deletes any equipment you give to the drone to make it useful. And the one where the stat points you assign to it reset themselves every time you log off/crash. Can't forget that one.
And all the out-of-memory bugs. And the hourly crash to the desktop.
But yeah -- if you can overlook all that, you'll be hearing a LOT about this game!
(Also note: It's 9 days before launch and all of these bugs still persist.)
All of your points are valid, and I have experienced many of the same bugs. But they have publicly said that the beta build we are playing is about 4 weeks behind the actual build they are working on. I too have concerns about what the stability will be like at launch, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of a doubt and try it on launch and see.
I did try the single player demo and it seemed very stable, with no crashes or other bugs that I could see. Of course, it's only Holborn station and the first 5 character levels, so it's not that complex.
We'll have to wait and see, but this game has a lot of potential.
In "Screenshot 1" look at the character named Dotter. The lighting on her face and clothes would make you think the light source is to her right, but the shadow she casts on the floor is the complete opposite of where it should be for that light source. Looks terrible.
It's still in beta, so they will probably fix some of the lighting issues. I just loaded up the game and took screenshots of the first station I happened to load into. Some of the others are lit differently, and aren't quite as dim.
Oh yeah, Flagship Studios hired a crack team of people like me with relatively low Slashdot UIDs to surf the forums all weekend long and keep the conspiracy hidden! And we would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
(In case you couldn't tell, the above was sarcasm)
I'm actually just enjoying playing this game for the past couple of weeks, didn't find the ads very obtrusive, and found the EULA and User Agreement to be pretty generic compared to every other MMORPG around. Read them. All of them allow the company to use data about your gameplay, hardware specs, etc, in aggregate, as long as they don't share individual data with partners, who cares? In fact, if you read the agreement for most websites they say the exact same fucking thing.
On noes! You are broadcasting an IP Address! When will the spying stop?
I'm in the beta, and the NDA just lifted yesterday, so here are some screenshots. The ads are very unobtrusive. The game takes place in London, 2038, after hellgates have opened and demons have killed 99% of the people on the earth. So, having posters appear on the walls of dirty, blasted out subway tunnel walls fits in very well with the theme of the game. The posters are so dingy you can barely read them unless you look close, and it matches the post-apocalyptic feel of the game to see ads from the "past." Judge for yourself:
As far as the gameplay goes? This game totally rocks! Imagine if Diablo and Half-Life 2 had a baby. A demon and zombie infested, mutant loot pinata of a baby... Basically, you can hack and slash if you want to, pew-pew with spells if you want to, or shoot guns like an FPS if you want to. It's Diablo in full 3d, by Bill Roper and most of the guys from Blizzard North that created Diablo 1 and 2. There is single player and online multi-player. The online multi-player is instanced like Guild Wars, where only the towns are public. It's one hell of a lot of fun, and completely addictive, just like the original Diablos were. Imagine Diablo with full 3d, a physics engine, and exploding barrels ala HL2.
I think you're going to be hearing a lot of good things about this game.
On the other hand, Hellgate London demo was a real yawner. Very disappointing. Unplayably buggy in the gameplay department (everything else ran smoothly though) - I literally reached a dead end along the linear path that I had to take to get to the next zone and complete the main questline, which I assume upon completion the demo would end. Went back, and could find no alternative path through either of the last two areas on the path.
You reached the end of the demo. I've been playing in the actual beta, and where you reached a dead end, there is normally a portal to the next station. But, in all fairness, it even told you before you downloaded it that you got a demo of "Holborn Station", which is basically just the first 5 levels.
Besides not being able to go further than Holborn Station, what did you think of the actual gameplay? Wasn't it a tremendous amount of fun?
I do mind giving EA and Flagship blanket permission to examine everything on my computer. READ what their "agreement" says -- they can mine your computer for whatever data they want, and give/sell it to whomever pays for it.
This is such a non-story, it isn't even funny. Talk about blowing things out of proportion. Their agreement gives them the right to do less than Google has the right to do every time you make a search. What's more, they even promise not to use your individual data in any way. It is only used in aggregate form, pretty much like Google. Check this text, from the very agreement (emphasis mine):
EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers.
I've been playing the beta the last 2 weeks, and I must tell you, this game pretty much rocks. It's like Diablo 2 met Halflife 2 and they had a baby. A demon spawned, zombie killing, FPS if you want to or hack-n-slash or pew-pew with spells if you want to, clickfest of a game. This game is like Diablo 2 in full 3d on crack. It is about as addictive as crack, and you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the next couple weeks.
Ding, we/used/ to use them as layer 3 routers, but they couldn't keep up after the years and alas, they've been relegated to dumb layer 2 switches now. The poor cpu's can't keep up with anything else. We do have OOB serial management on them like you mentioned however.
Sorry I didn't realize you are actually the sysadmin or network admin at Slashdot. You don't have a/. symbol by your name so it's hard to tell if you're just a low uid pretending to know everything or if you actually do.:-)
And I hope you compile your own Apache because whatever shipped with Redhat 9 surely has vulnerabilities.:-)
I normally don't reply to Anonymous Cowards, but you're being such a pedantic ass that I felt it necessary.
And for $DEITY's sake, stop saying 'rout[ing|er]'... they're using them as L2 switches. They're 'switching'. Perhaps ask about the difference between the two at your next entry-level Cisco training course (which you appear to be long overdue for).
Perhaps you need a Cisco refresher course. "Switching" layer 3 is really just routing at the IP level. WTF is a Cisco Router other than a layer 3 switch? And, if you want to be really pedantic, a layer 2 switch actually routes packets between physical ports on a switch based on the MAC address (layer 2 address) of each host attached. So yes, it is both a switch and it also routes packets. Quite being a pedantic asshole.
And for the love of all things holy, please don't use the term 'boxen' again. It's the year 2007.
I'll use the term boxes or boxen as I see fit thank you very much. Did I offend your sensibilities? Oh noes!
Actually BigIrons are intelligent layer 2 and 3 (and some can even do 4 and above) switches, so they damn well better have an IP address. The management IP might not be accessible from the internet, but that doesn't mean you can't take it over. Some switches can be crashed (buffer overrun) just by routing bad data through them.
I'm not saying I would do anything like that, I'm just cautioning system administrators (I am one) to think twice before bragging about the uptime and exact architecture of your boxen. It lets shady characters know exactly what to target.
The BigIron 8000s have been in production since we built this data center in 2002 and actually, having just looked at it... haven't been rebooted since.
Gee, you really should update the firmware on your routers and switches more often than once every 5 years (or never). All I really need to do to hack Slashdot now is to look at all of the vulnerabilities on BigIron 8000s for the last 5 years and pick one to exploit. I wouldn't do that, but I'm sure a lot of miscreants could DOS you something fierce, or just plain wreak havoc by shutting off switch ports or routing everything to/dev/null.
Sidenote: This began the misconception that lag time benefited the lagger, or that laggy players lag the whole server, neither of which is true. The quicker your ping time, the faster your shots or actions will register on the server. If a high ping bastard and low ping bastard shoot each other at the same exact moment, the LPB will have his shot register first, and the HPB will die.
What they really need to implement in order to have a "fair" online PvP experience is some kind of time synchronization between the clients and servers. If everyone is following the same time code (synchronized via NTP or some similar method), then clients can digitally sign their packets and embed the timestamp in the action. Then, in the scenario you mentioned above, the server receives both "shoot" requests at different times, verifies a valid digital signature (in order to prevent cheaters that would fudge timecodes or alter the packets in transit), and whoever really shot first wins.
There are probably a lot of problems with this scenario (how do you get the clients to sync up and avoid drift in their timecode) but I believe it is the only way to fairly run a PvP type of online game like WoW or Guild Wars.
Why? The licensing costs were probably cheaper than the litigation over Amazon's patent would have been, and they quite possibly wouldn't have been awarded costs even if they had won such a challenge.
Apple sold over 1 billion tracks on iTMS. They were paying at least X cents a song to use 1-click. You do the math. Even if X is only 1 cent that's still a lot of pennies. It's about the same as saying "Gee, I'm sure glad we just bought those 10,000 SCO Linux right-to-use licenses for $699 a piece," after watching SCO swirl down the toilet when they lost their case.
Chances are that anyone who's paid up for a license from Amazon is SOL, since the contract would almost certainly include a provision that they can't sue even if the patent ends up getting spiked. Anyone who hasn't executed a contract with Amazon, but has incurred expenses in defending themselves might be able to recover some damages.
Sucks to be Steve Jobs and Apple and realize that you've been licensing 1-click for iTMS for years now when it wasn't even a valid patent...
Frankly, as much as I loathe the RIAA, Thomas' story simply didn't hold up. The prosecution was able to prove that in an attempt to evade prosecution, she had replaced her hard drive shortly after receiving a warning notice from the RIAA, not before as she claimed.
Actually, the only notice she got was an IM over Kazaa from MediaDefender that said something like "We are the RIAA!!! You're busted!!!!1!!!!1111!11one!!1!" They never received a reply to the IM, and who knows if she was even sitting at the computer, given that Kazaa stays running in the background 24/7. Given the kind of crap you might normally get in anonymous IMs over file sharing networks, if it had been me, I would have chuckled, deleted it, and gone about my merry way.
Furthermore, if you look at the dates on the case, she didn't even get the hard drive replaced until 3 weeks after the IM was sent, and long before she ever received any official filing, summons, or notice. Waiting 3 weeks after receiving a threatening IM is hardly behavior indicating someone is trying to cover their tracks. If she was really worried, she would have had the drive replaced the very next day. Or, if she was really trying to cover her tracks and not just replacing a failed hard drive, she might have done it after receiving the offical court filing, summons, or notice or whatever it was they send to your door. She did it before.
While she may very well have been sharing files, the facts in this story don't line up enough for me to consider her liable for copyright infringement. I wish I would have had jury duty so I could have exercised my constitutional right and duty of jury nullification.
Just don't let him bring up the neon tubes and Arctic Silver conductive paste and water-cooled RAM in your own bedroom.
Neon tubes are stupid, but Arctic Silver does actually conduct heat better than most conductive paste, primarily because it has metal particles in it, where as normal silicone paste is actually an insulator. A quick googling of "arctic silver benchmark" returned the following review where they actually measured the CPU temperature using both types of paste.
Things like temperature can be easily measured. The audiophiles seem to use terms that are intentionally subjective mumbo-jumbo and can't be empirically measured. Can you measure the "foot tappiness" of a particular speaker cable empirically?
We'd all gotten through the introductory tutorial ("noob island") and completed several quests on the main land. Upon exiting the game and logging back in all 3 of us would find our characters back on noob island, yet the quests to get us back to the mainland were not available! None of us could figure out how to play the game again so we all uninstalled.
I signed up and was accepted to the original closed beta test of Tabula Rasa, which started several months ago. At the time, I logged in and the game was a buggy mess. This was in June and the game was only 4 months from release. I honestly tried to play it, but the bugs were so horrendous that it was very difficult. I thought the initial training mission was pretty fun. You move with a squad of soldiers and hide behind cover, jumping out to shoot down aliens. You place a few strategic explosive devices to blow up enemy gunner turrets and take over a control post. So far, so good. I levelled up to level 5, travelled outside of "noob island" and reached a point in the game where I would have to make a choice what career path I would want to take. TR offers a "clone" feature which is pretty neat, where you can clone your character right before making any major decision, so that you can always go back and choose a different path. I cloned my character, then logged out and back in and discovered, to my shock, that I was naked and all of my gear was gone. I tried creating another character, starting over, and every time I logged out, my gear would disappear. I went on the beta forums, and everyone was having this problem. This was a complete show-stopping bug, and yet, here we were, beta testers, almost completly unable to play the game because our gear would disappear every time we logged out.
I gave up playing at that point, and then recently, in August, I got another email from them saying "There's a new build out, come back and try it, and let us know what you think. We improved the game a lot." So, I downloaded the 2GB new build, logged on and tried it out. The stability has improved a lot, but there are still a few bugs and it's just reaching the point now where I think it is "public beta" quality. The game, however, gets boring very fast. The "ethical decisions" you have to make, which were so hyped in the interviews with Richard Garriott, seem to be not really meaningful and don't make any impact on the game world as far as I can tell, any more than choosing Aldor or Scryer does in WoW (in case you've played WoW).
Basically, it's like any MMO, except with guns instead of swords. You run around and shoot things. Quests are "collect 10 boar hides and return to me." Yes, one of the very first quests in the game is to kill boars and collect their hides... I don't think they could get much less original if they tried.
I don't really have the time to give a full review, but this game for me is a big "pass." It might have had potential to be really cool if it was like a Halo MMO, but it is anything but.
the problem being, to think that science and religion have anything to do with each other at all, in a negative or positive way. they are simply oil and water, science and religion. they don't mix. at all
Sure, here in the US you can keep them separate, but in Islamic countries that follow Sharria (sp?) law, there is no separation, because the religion makes the laws. They dictate when you will wake up in the morning, when you will say your prayers, what type of clothing you will wear, whether women or men can drive, whether women can leave the house without a male escort, etc. How can you possibly avoid mixing religion and science (to the detriment of science), when your every waking move is dictated by a centuries old manuscript, written by a so-called prophet that most likely took some magic mushrooms, hallucinated, and saw god?
Slashdot Mirror
I read a far more plausible reason in the book Freakonomics (great book btw), which postulates that the fall in crime rates in the US was attributable to the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court. The logic is that unwanted children are more likely to fall into a life of crime, due to their mothers not caring for them properly, therefore, the low crime rates we are seeing now are directly due to a generation of children that were raised after Roe v. Wade, where abortions were legal. I find that much more believable, although it's not necessarily politically correct to have opinions like this among pro-life control freaks...
To read more: Legalized Abortion and the Crime Effect
But, no, far more likely that it's some grand conspiracy by Verizon to saturate the internet with spam delivered at 100 megabit + speeds to as to completely shut the internet down. Then they can charge all of us extra money for access to the "V-net" (Verizon net)...
Alright, Single Sign On (SSO) is a good thing usually. But haven't they ever heard of LDAP before? Why have username/passwords in the database, especially if they suspect hackers might compromise the database? What they really should do is have external authentication servers running LDAP and have both the game client and the forums use that as an authentication source.
It never ceases to amaze me when companies that should know better do stupid things.
All of your points are valid, and I have experienced many of the same bugs. But they have publicly said that the beta build we are playing is about 4 weeks behind the actual build they are working on. I too have concerns about what the stability will be like at launch, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of a doubt and try it on launch and see.
I did try the single player demo and it seemed very stable, with no crashes or other bugs that I could see. Of course, it's only Holborn station and the first 5 character levels, so it's not that complex.
We'll have to wait and see, but this game has a lot of potential.
(In case you couldn't tell, the above was sarcasm)
I'm actually just enjoying playing this game for the past couple of weeks, didn't find the ads very obtrusive, and found the EULA and User Agreement to be pretty generic compared to every other MMORPG around. Read them. All of them allow the company to use data about your gameplay, hardware specs, etc, in aggregate, as long as they don't share individual data with partners, who cares? In fact, if you read the agreement for most websites they say the exact same fucking thing.
On noes! You are broadcasting an IP Address! When will the spying stop?
I'm in the beta, and the NDA just lifted yesterday, so here are some screenshots. The ads are very unobtrusive. The game takes place in London, 2038, after hellgates have opened and demons have killed 99% of the people on the earth. So, having posters appear on the walls of dirty, blasted out subway tunnel walls fits in very well with the theme of the game. The posters are so dingy you can barely read them unless you look close, and it matches the post-apocalyptic feel of the game to see ads from the "past." Judge for yourself:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
As far as the gameplay goes? This game totally rocks! Imagine if Diablo and Half-Life 2 had a baby. A demon and zombie infested, mutant loot pinata of a baby... Basically, you can hack and slash if you want to, pew-pew with spells if you want to, or shoot guns like an FPS if you want to. It's Diablo in full 3d, by Bill Roper and most of the guys from Blizzard North that created Diablo 1 and 2. There is single player and online multi-player. The online multi-player is instanced like Guild Wars, where only the towns are public. It's one hell of a lot of fun, and completely addictive, just like the original Diablos were. Imagine Diablo with full 3d, a physics engine, and exploding barrels ala HL2.
I think you're going to be hearing a lot of good things about this game.
Besides not being able to go further than Holborn Station, what did you think of the actual gameplay? Wasn't it a tremendous amount of fun?
And I hope you compile your own Apache because whatever shipped with Redhat 9 surely has vulnerabilities.
Actually BigIrons are intelligent layer 2 and 3 (and some can even do 4 and above) switches, so they damn well better have an IP address. The management IP might not be accessible from the internet, but that doesn't mean you can't take it over. Some switches can be crashed (buffer overrun) just by routing bad data through them.
I'm not saying I would do anything like that, I'm just cautioning system administrators (I am one) to think twice before bragging about the uptime and exact architecture of your boxen. It lets shady characters know exactly what to target.
There are probably a lot of problems with this scenario (how do you get the clients to sync up and avoid drift in their timecode) but I believe it is the only way to fairly run a PvP type of online game like WoW or Guild Wars.
In a way, this guy just pulled a prank Bart pulled in the Simpsons a few time, but on a much larger scale, when real people's lives are at stake.
Furthermore, if you look at the dates on the case, she didn't even get the hard drive replaced until 3 weeks after the IM was sent, and long before she ever received any official filing, summons, or notice. Waiting 3 weeks after receiving a threatening IM is hardly behavior indicating someone is trying to cover their tracks. If she was really worried, she would have had the drive replaced the very next day. Or, if she was really trying to cover her tracks and not just replacing a failed hard drive, she might have done it after receiving the offical court filing, summons, or notice or whatever it was they send to your door. She did it before.
While she may very well have been sharing files, the facts in this story don't line up enough for me to consider her liable for copyright infringement. I wish I would have had jury duty so I could have exercised my constitutional right and duty of jury nullification.
Things like temperature can be easily measured. The audiophiles seem to use terms that are intentionally subjective mumbo-jumbo and can't be empirically measured. Can you measure the "foot tappiness" of a particular speaker cable empirically?
I gave up playing at that point, and then recently, in August, I got another email from them saying "There's a new build out, come back and try it, and let us know what you think. We improved the game a lot." So, I downloaded the 2GB new build, logged on and tried it out. The stability has improved a lot, but there are still a few bugs and it's just reaching the point now where I think it is "public beta" quality. The game, however, gets boring very fast. The "ethical decisions" you have to make, which were so hyped in the interviews with Richard Garriott, seem to be not really meaningful and don't make any impact on the game world as far as I can tell, any more than choosing Aldor or Scryer does in WoW (in case you've played WoW).
Basically, it's like any MMO, except with guns instead of swords. You run around and shoot things. Quests are "collect 10 boar hides and return to me." Yes, one of the very first quests in the game is to kill boars and collect their hides... I don't think they could get much less original if they tried.
I don't really have the time to give a full review, but this game for me is a big "pass." It might have had potential to be really cool if it was like a Halo MMO, but it is anything but.